


Apocalypse

by ElectricKettle (DaLaRi)



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Disabled Character, Closeted Character, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Queer Culture, References to Depression, Trans Male Character, t4t
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:46:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27797158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaLaRi/pseuds/ElectricKettle
Summary: The world seems not to understand that the world ended years ago. That the sun rises doesn't mean anything when Hermann stares the impending continuation of death and destruction in the face daily. As the years go on, he feels insane for how real the deaths and numbers feel to him. No one understands except for his lab partner, the absolute worst colleague in the world.Hermann is lonely, closeted, and so, so tired in the expanse beyond the end of the world.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29





	Apocalypse

**Author's Note:**

> The first wave of COVID made it suddenly incredibly easy to relate to the characters in Pacific Rim in a way that surprised me during a rewatch. I didn't know what to do with the emotions that came up, so I wrote this. I only edited it now.
> 
> cw: mental illness, one instance of a reclaimed slur, the rigidity of cis/heterosexual society, vivid depictions of the mental toll of being closeted
> 
> This work is dedicated to the nurses and public health analysts that spend their days staring the second wave in the face. You're not nuts for fearing as intensely as you do, and one day, I hope, we too will stop the clock.

Hermann wears the sweatshirts because they’re comfortable. It’s not to hide the way his shoulders have curled in as access to good chiropractors has gotten harder, it’s not to disguise the way that his chest, after years of atrophy, has caved into itself except along the lines that support his cane. It’s not even to hide the belly that he just barely manages not to feel self-conscious about. It’s because they’re comfortable, and as the world has come to an end, he’s found it increasingly silly to deny himself comfort. Especially when his work life has become ever-increasingly intolerable.

Newton is, quite frankly, the worst coworker Hermann has ever had. He includes his exploitative and manipulative lab heads, his many, many managers at his service-sector jobs, and even the parents of the abhorrent rich children he began to tutor once he had his bachelor’s. newton was a class of his own. He was beyond discourtesy, he was beyond professional dislike, no, Hermann hated newton on a deep, personal level. He also could not think of another person he would rather spend the end of days with.

The thing about the end of the world, was that if you didn’t keep a close eye on yourself, it could feel normal. The horror became numbing, in a way. Newton, at least, kept the horror alive in Hermann. Faced every day with newton’s fanatical adulation towards the kaiju, the weight of the deaths and the cities burned hit him afresh, and it drove him into the work he might have, with any other partner, delayed. Under newton’s care, their projects continued apace, with hermann’s doom-and-gloom lighting a similar fire in newton (an _analogous_ fire, with Hermann unwilling to speculate) and driving him to ever-dizzying heights of hypothesis, unorthodox experimentation, and replicable success. Newton was brilliant. Hermann was far too old to think that that meant anything about being easy to live with.

\- - -

They lived near each other. Newton walked around the block including his room shirtless, tattoos and inverted-t scars out for all who could recognize them, and in his room Hermann, tried to roll his shoulders back only to have old, crunchy scar tissue seize and leave him wiping desperate, frightened tears from his eyes. It had been so long since the world ended. Some days his chest was more a care than his fully unpredictable leg.

Newton didn’t know that Hermann could recognize his scars, and Hermann had no inclination to tell him. The man’s mind was a steel trap when it came to secrets, and a steel trap stepped on by a jaeger when it came to remembering not to share them. Being stealth at the end of the world had its perks, and chief among them was not having to pretend a sense of camaraderie with his coworker just because of their shared experiences. He hated newton regardless of what they shared, and even though there were times he desperately missed the community of having another trans person to discuss their experiences, what he wanted was his life before the end of the world back, not anything to do with newton.

It made him think, though, to see Newton walk around, especially as the years passed and he grew to know their neighbors, came to mourn them as the ones who worked beyond the concrete walls fell in their swathes, if their experiences mattered overmuch from before the world ended. He knew there were people who persisted in living their lives, young people who laughed and flirted and fell in love and got pregnant and moved into their housing block, old people who invited their new grandchildren over and spoke raucously with their friends, adults harriedly arguing with their teenage children about restricted areas and shatterdome and smoking near circuitry. The thing was, with Newton as his partner, he couldn’t partake. He felt alone, alone in the knowledge of how awful it was and how much worse it was going to get, except when he was with newton.

With the higher-ups, too, he could find some relief, but it was foreign to him, the idea of funding and equivocating, and cutting whole departments, and _decommissioning jaegers_ now in the time when they needed him most. Newton egged him on when he complained to him about the coastal wall, played devil’s advocate just to watch Hermann unfold himself and shout, retreating, wincing, to his huddled posture once he had found the limiting boundary of his shame at being easy to rile. He couldn’t understand why it wasn’t simple. Why he had to watch cities continue to be wiped off the map, people like specks dying their too-human deaths from within the organization that was supposed to prioritize their safety above all else. Newton didn’t care about them, too, but at least it was because he’d thrown his lot in with the opposing side, not because they didn’t matter. Human life mattered to newton. It was just that kaiju life mattered more. It seemed that way, most of the time, but they’d worked together for a long time, and sometimes, on the longest nights, Hermann could see the same fever-light in newton’s eyes, the drive to finish this, to end this hell, to repair what could be repaired and end the deaths, end the deaths on the scale they had never seen. Hermann wouldn’t dare call them similar, but their work complimented their shared goal, if not each other. They would get their work where it needed to be, if it took all their lives, if it killed them both, and even if it made them reliant on each other. Personal abhorrence had no place at the end of the world

\- - -

It became remarkable, after a certain point, that they didn’t spend casual time together. They, by this point, were each other’s primary relationship. They spoke more words to each other than any other person, knew each other better than any of their family, living or dead. Hermann had heard newton being railed into the wall of his room enough times, and newton had seen Hermann collapse on the landing of his pod and sob enough times for them to know all too well how they were coping. They had also seen each other grow out of those coping mechanisms and into other ones, newton picking up interval training and Hermann taking back up his physical therapy routines from almost a decade prior. For all of that, they spent very little time with each other unmediated by the presence of their work. Hermann wondered after that, felt the loneliness of their relative positions acutely, and did nothing to change it.

The work was accelerating, austerity encroaching, the end of times drawing in like the closing of a drawstring bag. There was nothing for it. They would survive until they didn’t. What was the point in wishing, even, that they would eat dinner with each other? Hermann certainly wouldn’t invite newton, and newton would never think to ask. Hermann wished, with a fervency that increased by the day, that he still had the life he’d had in Vienna. His friends were either dead, missing in action, or too poor to contact him regularly, and his family found him fevered and odd. He felt insane talking to them, who lived inland and watched the destruction in the pacific on the news. He felt repulsed by them, and they felt the thinning of his love. They begged him to come home, and every time they did he threw himself ever more feverishly into his work. Things were getting worse. He couldn’t run. He wouldn’t. not even if the world ended. Not even if the world ended and the sun rose the next day.

He had expected the quality of the work to suffer as they did. It did, in many ways. He began to lose track of units, measurements that would calibrate on the first try now needing to be scanned before being reported, coding projects doubling in length just because of the stiffness of his ever-wearing-down will. But the essential work, his predictions, newton’s biochemical theories, they continued apace even as the two of them began to visibly suffer. Newton’s energy levels indicated his access to ADHD-managing medication had finally worn through, and his reputation suffered. He became impulsive, and Hermann, already stretched to his breaking point, was put in charge of babysitting him in social situations. Newton loathed it at once, but Hermann was relieved, suddenly, at the increase in contact between them two. It didn’t take long before Newton had seized upon their increased contact as an opportunity to needle Hermann further, but the thick cotton-wool of hermann’s socially starved fondness insulated him from the worst of it, though what remained fully reminded him why he had dubbed newton the worst colleague he had ever had.

Where hermann’s empathy had worn out at the knees, newton’s had been shredded and fed to the engine of his work. He praised kaiju openly, relying on the shatterdome residents to ignore him or fight him, and hermann’s guilty conscience twinged even as his frayed nerves demanded he accept there was nothing he could do, that he had grappled himself to newton with hoops of steel and that he could no more insulate the shatterdome from newton than he could insulate himself. He took his comfort from his babysitter position selfishly and tried to do what he could with the energy that relief afforded him. He slept better, and his coding improved. He invited Newton to dinner and Newton turned him down without giving it a thought. Herman tried not to feel bad about deriving pleasure from the time they spent together. He failed, but somehow Newton warmed up to him.

The thing about Newton, though, was that the more he warmed up to Hermann the more Hermann hated him. He had no sense of decorum, no decency, no willingness to allow other people the grace he incautiously demanded for himself. He saw himself as an unstoppable force, likened to a comet, on an unwavering track towards a correct analysis. He seemed at times a visionary, at times an oracle, and at others a deeply unprincipled scientist. Hermann couldn’t even call him an academic. He’d long since abandoned the academic model, peer review so far from his mind that being called to account seemed not to occur to himself. Hermann supposed a similar drift had happened to him. He couldn’t imagine turning his work over to anyone in his field, to have their eyes rove over it, have them critique it without the experience that drove the desperation in his methodology, his hastily-hacked-off corners. They were both dangerously beyond the pale. Hermann didn’t delude himself that he was the only one who was self-aware. Newton had been employed in academia too, once. It had been a different planet, then, but they were both haunted academics, cursed to either save the world or abandon themselves in search of a cure and perish as a result of it.

Hermann thought long and hard about what exactly the difference between him and newton could be, that newton could embrace this change, this new world, this new way of being, and Hermann couldn’t. He wondered if newton had surrendered his desperate longings for his old life in his search for the salvation of the new one. He wondered if he could risk attempting the same on nothing but speculation. He never spoke to newton about this, always as unattainable a conversation for them as a conversation on hermann’s despair was for him and his family. He spent an entire depressive spiral lodged firmly in his own head about it, until suddenly the fever broke and the realization that he had no obligations to pursue resolution hit him like the brush of cold water. He could use his apathy, his numb, depressed exhaustion, how newton used his unmedicated ADHD. To the benefit of his work at the exclusion of everything else.

\- - -

Newton seemed to appreciate Hermann’s new attitude. Hermann couldn’t care. He found it easier to be petty towards Newton the way Newton had always been towards him, and their relationship reached a new level of ascerbity that, a mere month ago, he never would have considered with another sane human being. It felt so nice to indulge in something so vapid and common and unproductive. Sometimes counterproductive. Their work, which had consumed the last decade and a half of their lives, became a source of play. They actively sabotaged each other, and under these petty disruptions, with themselves as a veil between them and the sinking overwhelming horror, they both progressed in leaps in bounds. Upon discovering a truly bitchy dynamic, a cattiness Hermann had sworn off as one of the pale joys of his birth gender, he found himself at ease and emotionally capable of doing his work in a way that he hadn’t been in years.

The shatterdome immediately assumed they were fucking. Hermann had to bite down the kneejerk angry reaction that people would assume he and the other queer trans man in the department would be fucking, remembering not only that he was stealth, he wasn’t out. He hadn’t slept with anyone on-base or even adjacent to base in the entire time he’d worked there, and he knew from long experience that, optical illusion-like, he seemed straight and masculine enough from far away. His disability, his posture, and his cane masked his youth from the world in a way that made him seem sexless to the eye not directly trained on him. It was his association with newton, whose period of sexual ravenousness Hermann had been deeply aware of, that fomented the rumors. Newton fully ignored them, and that was how Hermann realized newton thought he was straight.

It certainly put things into context. The way they’d seemed to talk past each other for years, Newton’s seemingly-genuine obtuseness, his lack of consideration for Hermann as a person. As a youth, Hermann personally had dabbled in heterophobia, and it made him laugh to think that he had been on the receiving end of it for the last decade and a half. It wasn’t nearly the engine of Newton’s awfulness to be around, but it was an element to it Hermann had previously never understood. He abruptly felt very silly. It stung, surprisingly, to pass well enough not just as a cis man but as a straight one that Newton would never guess, but it was what he had signed up for in exchange for his safety. He permitted himself to cry about it in private, silent, furious tears about the injustice of it all, that the world could be ending and on top of it people could think he was straight. For the first time in years he felt dysphoric about it, for twenty minutes in front of the mirror in pleated dress pants, and it was a cold, dull knife he had not missed in the time since it had last appeared. He knew it would vanish, and it did, but left him feeling isolated even from Newton. Newton, who walked around the housing block shirtless and who had gotten more reprimands for public sex than any other living resident of the shatterdome. What did he have to offer in the face of that, when they were very clearly not even slightly the same?

He kept waiting for something to happen, for something to change, but what ended up happening was that he got used to the discomfort of it. There was a bit less play in his tearing into Newton, and while he didn’t let his work suffer, Newton wondered what he’d done and Hermann couldn’t tell him. Fifteen years of being back in the closet tied a knot around his throat to strangle him, and Newton thought it was because Hermann had found out how much sex he had or something equally ridiculous. Hermann, who had discovered public sex at 17 back when he was still layering sports bras to look flat. Hermann, who had had a twelve year split with his family for being outed in a gay public sex sting. Hermann, whose low sex drive had been driven by nerve degeneration and seizures, wracking pain triggered by orgasm, exacerbated by an extremely aggressive course of SSRIs that had only run out four years ago, after years of careful rationing. Hermann was a closeted gay trans man alone at the end of the world, but the fact was… that none of that mattered because human lives were ending by the droves. And he had the skillset to stop it. His loneliness could wait. His fury and dysphoria and isolation could wait. The world was ending, and the end was drawing nigh. If he died, walled in by concrete, closeted and alone, that would be acceptable if he just finished, just finished before he went.

\- - -

Newton started worrying about him. It started as nagging, barefaced from the beginning in its truth as concern to hermann’s jewish sensibilities, but the WASP academic in him rose to the bait at first, letting himself be harassed into babysitting Newton at meals, in meetings, at a social event or two. He could tell Newton could tell there was something wrong with him, but he refused to sledgehammer it out of Hermann and Hermann resented him for it.

He ended up coming out to Tendo. He had left, furious, from a drinks night where a drunk Newton had been causing a scene and picking a fight and not recognizing Hermann as someone with a right to tell him to back down or else. He was standing in one of the hallways, smoking a cigarette he’d bummed off a technician, and it was only as Tendo turned the corner looking for him that he realized he was holding it as he had in Vienna decades ago, very obviously like a faggot. He fixed his grip, but Tendo clocked him. Not as trans, but as something. He approached slowly, like Hermann was a wounded animal, his thumbs in his pockets but with his posture intentionally careless and soothingly open, and Hermann abruptly realized the severity of the set of his mouth, the warning blazing in his eyes. Tendo stopped a couple feet back from him, leaned against the wall. When he asked to take a drag, Hermann took the cigarette back from him and held it as he had before, visibly bristling, daring Tendo to say something. He didn’t, until he whistled through his teeth and said something about being too old to be surprised at being surprised, which on any other night would have something that Hermann would’ve laughed at. Tonight, his voice was harsh as he said that he’d spent a lot of time making sure no one would know. Tendo didn’t ask if Newt knew. It was obvious why Hermann was in that service corridor smoking. They talked about how long it had been since they had quit smoking, twenty years for Hermann and five for Tendo, Hermann feeling compelled to say that the end of the world had changed a lot for all of them. When Tendo, surprised, said that the world hadn’t ended yet, Hermann suddenly and all at once couldn’t stand to be so far away from Newton.

He put the butt out on one of the junctures a pipe, and bowed out ungracefully as he walked slightly ahead of Tendo all the way back to the corner of the residential block where the drinks night was being held. He immediately had to jump in and intercede with a pair of pilots who were clearly in the middle of thrashing a thoroughly trashed Newton. He didn’t see Tendo again that night, and Tendo didn’t seek him out any amount more than before. He was a superior officer, in spite of his whole demeanor, and Hermann hadn’t exactly been subtle about his preferred choice of company.

That night, Newton, uncharacteristically, let Hermann patch him up. Hermann had been a community medic for long enough that it was a quick process, but it did involve putting kinetic tape on his collarbone, which involved helping Newton in struggling out of his shirt and Hermann touching him considerably. Several minutes of deeply unwanted sexual intrusive thoughts later, Newton, who was fairly out of it, could be tucked into bed, joints stabilized and icepacks resting in the freezer. Hermann went across the corridor to his own room, sat down, pressed his thumb into his jaw until it clicked, and didn’t go to sleep until his mind stopped throwing images of Newton splayed under him subsided. It was a long night, not helped in the least that he’d drunk just enough to be bleary and photosensitive even in the middle of the night. Being hungover, alone, at 4am in a room without natural light was unpleasant and not an experience he had sought to replicate in a very long time. He didn’t quite crave a cigarette, but he did clamp a pencil between his teeth in an attempt to start the long, long route to sleep. Newton thanked him out of obligation the next morning, and Hermann felt something in himself relax. He hadn’t given himself away. Newton was his biggest liability, his greatest fear. The kaiju shook the coast, but somehow, in spite of himself, Hermann had found his way back to a living man’s emotion, albeit fear. The closet was a heady rush, in its way.

\- - -

Tendo didn’t out him. Time passed, nothing changed, and soon Hermann could even keep up his straight-passing façade around Tendo alone. The self-consciousness ebbed, and as the breach’s patterns intensified, his recent outing became less and less relevant. The coastal wall had failed. The end was upon them. Their work, as it was, had to be enough, because there simply was not any more time.

The first double event shook Hermann to his core. He drank that night with Newton, and Newton shouted at him when he wished that the breach would swallow the kaiju whole, rend them to pieces and leave newton with nothing but the scraps. He said that Hermann’s work was worthless, because the jaegers were never going to stop the kaiju now, what use was there in designing something whose only function was to tell people they were going to die. Hermann shouted back, that he wished Newton’s fields had never been formed, that he wished Newton would be rendered irrelevant, that his work would vanish like the years of their lives spent in hell, when he was suddenly slapped across the face with an intrusive thought of Newton spread across the dining table they were yelling at, tattoos writhing as he twisted under hermann’s hands. He made Newton go home then, and Newton left, shouting at him the whole way. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. It felt like self-harm to so much as give it a spark of air to breathe. He stretched his chest until it seized, until his back knotted up and his hand pulled back into an uneven claw and he just lay on the floor, waiting, unable to think, until his senses came back to him.

It was getting so hard to keep it together. The math and the work and the breach, he split his time between them all, so when he came into the lab to see Newton, limp in the floor, blood on his nose, unconscious and linked to a kaiju brain, his brain shut down. He could only hold him, like a child, like a brother-in-arms, like a lover, clutch him and try to force his mind, whose tenuous control had at last frayed enough to snap, to obey him. Instead he held newton as his blood dripped onto his shirt. Eventually an unhinged, shaking calm came over him and he went and got Pentecost. It was too much. He had seen too much. His chest, sore from heaving, twinged at him constantly. His leg was stiff beyond compare, and his cane arm hurt desperately. He wanted to sleep until the kaiju killed them all, consigned them to an oblivion from which he could watch the fact he loved Newton drift idly by him. It was the end of the world. It was the end of the end of the world, and it had shaken loose a wanting in him so foreign to his sense of self that it felt uncharacteristic, a long-forgotten element shaken loose in cataclysm’s final spasms. A desperate, hungry care for another person, and an unbelievable sweet relief at their continued existence.

Newton’s revelations drew the noose ever tighter around all their throats. Newton was cleared to go into the city, and Hermann continued his work. The work didn’t suffer, but his nerves did, jangling against the discordant new truth trying to find a space to nestle in his chest, among his visceral organs. He loved Newton. The irony of finding himself wanting, pun intended, at a time where he could not afford to be less than his best was an irony not lost on him. Eventually he struck a deal-- with himself, with the newfound truth, or with God he couldn’t say. _Let me save the world_ , he thought, _and I will fuck Newton until he can’t walk, and then I’ll stay the night after_. _I won’t ignore this, I promise. But I can’t do this now._ _Now, let me think. Please, let me work undisturbed_. And irrespective of whether the deal was struck with his traitorous heart or some higher, less fleshy power, it worked as well as it was able. He managed, and when Newton made contact, it was with work on his mind more than anything else that he took a helicopter into the city.

\- - -

He couldn’t have imagined that he’d need to drift with Newton.

He had thought of it, in the desperation of not wanting Newton to kill himself in service of his work, but he had never expected it to end up in the realm of reality. Drifting technology was for pilots, not people like them with no simulation experience and more disqualifying factors than points in favor when it came to pilot criteria. He had never thought it would happen. That being said, it was with complete clarity and certainty that Hermann offered to join him in drifting with the kaiju. The apotheosis of their work was upon them. They needed each other, and they needed this plan to work.

. .

The drift, to Hermann’s mind, feels like being submerged in ice. It takes a second to breathe through it, to not fight it and accept the experience. They are pulled through Newton-Newt’s memories first, child to girl-child to girl-teen to boy-teen to young-man to youngish-man to now. There’s a listlessness and an ennui and a rage to it that crystallize during his academic tenure, bearing fruits in his thesis and dissertation. The world ends, and so does his ability to keep himself from making a nuisance out of everything he is. He has to be. The world is ending and he’s the only one who seems to see it. It’s not until the gaze turns on Hermann that he realizes how much he himself is motivated by fear. A girl-childhood Newton brushes through with acceptance and disbelief, the debilitating onset of his degeneration, the decline of his posture, the decision on a cold winter night in a flat with awful heating that the PPDC isn’t going to get to know anything about him, and the slow quiet years of his closeting, the long drives to trusted friends with whom he’s able to stop pretending and experience honest pleasure-- in company, in sex, in conversation-- and briefly wake the dead thing of desire in his chest even as he feels it, too, begin to atrophy. They hurtle towards the present, and the looming roil of the kaiju’s mind, and Hermann has to decide to surrender to the cold-water shock of Newton’s reaction to this new understanding of him. Newton almost chases the rabbit, desperate for information, but the fever-light of their almost complete work has them, and he will not give it up now. And then, suddenly the world is alien from all they know, and it overwhelms them.

Some unknown amount of time later, the brain they’re attached to dies. Seizing of his diaphragm has Hermann vomiting into the nearest receptacle, a tragically convenient discarded toilet by the kaiju carcass. The smell of ammonia hits the raw back of his throat like a scouring pad. Newton offers him something to wipe his mouth with, but they’re already speaking, trembling together. They have to get back. They have to get back _now._

_. ._

It works. That’s the first thought that comes to him after hours.

It costs them everything, but it works. The breach closes, decades of Hermann’s life disappearing with it into nothingness, and the lifeline between Newton’s work and the world is severed. He sags, slightly, at Hermann’s side when it happens. Is this apotheosis? Is this resolution? To Hermann it feels like the climax is passed, in a way. A set of concerns, suddenly less pressing, to be replaced by another. A jangling warmth he doesn’t know what to do about. He recognizes he made a vow, either to himself or God, but suddenly a future exists in which it is possible for honoring it to be a short-, medium-, or even long-term goal. It shakes him, rattles him to his core, and in the span between the closing of the breach and the celebration, he feels the roaring want fill him up from stem to stern. It is no longer an intrusion. There is no coffin lid which needs to remain nailed down. As the victory hits them and the room fills with joy, he lets the thing long-buried once again rise from embers and roar to life.

They make it back to Hermann’s place under cover of not having slept the night before, which is true, surprisingly, for both of them, and Hermann pins Newton against the wall and tears kisses from him, one after another after another. Newton is a man starved, but Hermann, already drunk off the recognition of self in other, wants to wring from Newton slowly the submission he desired from him for fifteen years, and as Newton realizes the depth and implacability of Hermann’s want, from a more recent slumber comes back to life the drive in his body to submit. Hermann takes, and Newton gives. It is not so hard for them, in the end, to compromise. To find, in spite of the clear demarcation, the tape line, between self and other and in the meeting find that the ravenous feast of joy and desirousness never, even in extremis, goes more than dead-seeming dormant.


End file.
